


He doesn’t have the heart

by Cafechan



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, old people angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-30
Updated: 2012-01-30
Packaged: 2017-10-30 08:33:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/329837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cafechan/pseuds/Cafechan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even for the Knight of Time, age is inevitable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He doesn’t have the heart

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this during class at college because it was a boring day and I felt inspired. It's a little disjointed since I was only halfway paying attention to it, haha.
> 
> It's about Terezi and Dave, though it doesn't have to necessarily be in a romantic way, although I imagined them as a married couple here. Haw.

“Tez, I’m so fucking old,” Dave says plainly one day after a brief consultation with the bathroom mirror.

His companion sneaks up from behind and snakes her arms—with only some slight height difference-induced difficulty—around his shoulders and rests her head against his back. She likes to feel his voice reverberate through his body.

“Hehehe, what are you on about?” she questions neutrally.

“I don’t know. It’s just that my birthday’s soon.”

His briefness is an indication that he’s more upset about it than he’s letting on; she knows Dave has a tendency to become curt when something’s bothering him. “So what? What’s one more insignificant human year?”

He simply shrugs and sighs. “It’s just that I’ve got more wrinkles than a hippo’s ass.”

“Gross,” Terezi says with a snicker, waltzing her way to his front and placing two lukewarm hands against his cheeks. Her face twists in contemplation and her fingers trace the lines in his skin. “I don’t see what the big deal is. I kinda like your skin like this. It’s like one of your t-shirts after a wash, all fresh and wrinkly. And it still smells as creamy as ever!”

Dave makes a noncommittal noise at the back of his throat and shrugs again.

“Don’t you shrug at me, cool kid,” she reproves, and he does soften a bit at the long forgotten nickname. Even in his old age, Dave has failed to lose his snappy sense of ‘cool’ humor, but it has of course toned down considerably. Around his late thirties, a premature gray hair had found its way onto Dave’s head full of blonde, and he realized with a wry sort of awareness that the concept of ‘being a cool kid’ had met its expiration date for him.

Dave looks at her—really looks at her, for the first time in a long time. Sure, he sees her everyday, but over time, he began to only see the essence of who she is rather than all the minute physicality of her person. He did, though, when they first met; even now, he can remember with complete clarity what she looked like all those years ago. A thin and wiry whisper of a girl with a too-wide smile full of way too many teeth.

Terezi is every bit as vibrant as she used to be. Her kind, he realized long ago, ages at a different pace than humans. She’s taller and a tad more filled out, but not by a substantial amount. According to Kanaya, Terezi was a bit of a late bloomer, even by troll standards. She didn’t really develop distinct feminine characteristics until around human age 25, and it had been incredibly difficult to dance around the fact that when they were both 18, Terezi still looked like a middle schooler. Dave can’t count on only two hands how many suspicious glares had been shot his way during that phase.

She has a few minuscule wrinkles around her eyes and mouth—all of which betray how much she smiles—but aside from those tiny cracks in her visage of youth, she looks like a well-aged woman in her thirties by now.

They’re both nearing 90.

“Doesn’t it bug you that I practically look like your fucking grandpa,” he drawls quietly, no longer attempting to conceal his concern. He’s learned by now that it’s easier to be upfront with Terezi rather than deflect her with endless prevarication and metaphors, though he does occasionally invoke them anyway just because that’s how he copes with himself. But today he’s too tired for beating around the bush.

“Dave,” Terezi says seriously, and the somberness of her tone almost scares him. “I am blind. I don’t give a flying hoofbeast turd over your premature signs of human oldness. And even if I weren’t blind, I still would not yield the turd to you. Just keep being Dave, and smelling delicious, and I’ll be happy.”

Dave stares at her and cracks the most bitter of smiles before smoothing down her hair fondly. “Then I won’t ask for your horse shit. Thanks, Terezi.”

Her laugh, thankfully, has not changed much aside from going down an octave or so. One of his clearest first memories of meeting her in person is her ear-shatteringly loud cackle that was always shocking coming from her tiny frame. Back then, she was incapable of a transition between a smile and a howl; Terezi Pyrope knew nothing of soft giggles or faint chuckles. It was either shrieking or nothing.

Now, she can manage sounds of mirth that are slightly less headache-inducing, but there’s still something uniquely Terezi about it. And unlike his 13 year old self, Dave doesn’t try as hard anymore to refrain from grinning at her infectious racket. He just wonders, as much as he tries to drown out the thought with her laughter, if she knows that humans don’t live as long as trolls either. He doesn’t have the heart to bring it up.


End file.
